Ideapad S340 with Ubuntu+Win10 in dual boot mode

I have been a Ubuntu users for the last 10+ years. I have shortlisted Ideapad S340 laptop model 81VW00CVIN with 8GB RAM, SSD and HDD with standard ports and 15-inch FHD screen. I would like to instal Ubuntu 18.04 LTS (or Mint 19.3) as primary OS and Windows 10 (pre-installed) as a backup in dual-boot format.

There is not much information I could find on the web reg this combination of S340 and Ubuntu. I am wondering if that means this combination is not working well.

Would anyone be able to offer views based on actual use of this laptop with Ubuntu?

Thanks.

The reason you didn’t find much is because there are millions of different devices on the planet, which is why there won’t be a tutorial specific to one piece of hardware, except this hardware is extremely popular and/or special.

Please read the FAQ, which features plenty of tutorial resources for a dual boot installation. If you have trouble with the tutorial, you will be helped.

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Since you are a 10 year Ubuntu user, ditch the W10, install Linux and then since you have a W10 license, install Virtual Box and then put W 10 in the VB. You will only have W10 phone home as you use VB plus you then will have full control over your laptop. I have done that with a Dell Vostro in 2011 and it worked like a charm…

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Thank you.I have got the laptop now. will test and report soon.

Thank you. Yes that’s a possibility if the pre-installed W10 key could be used in VB. Will try. My main intention was to find out if S340 and Ubuntu work well. Have the laptop now. Will report soon.

The key may be found on the bottom of the laptop, it is a series of mixed characters, 5 sections of 5 characters. Furthermore you can download an ISO and install it directly in Virtual Box.
I haven’t found a computer yet that Ubuntu did not work on , even very old ones can be used.

I had installed few Linuxes in s340 14" with i5-1035G4, dual booting with Windows 10. It came with RST drivers. It had to be changed to AHCI in the Bios. But, before you do that, you have to change some registry entries. You can read more about it here, https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/ubuntu-installation-on-computers-with-intel-r-rst-enabled/15347
I didn’t have any boot problems.

You can also look here for extra info. https://support.thinkcritical.com/kb/articles/switch-windows-10-from-raid-ide-to-ahci

Will try that. Have read something about digital license vs product key etc. Mine seems to have digital license. Will figure something out. Thanks.

I will OstroL. Thanks for the pointers.

Have you installed Ubuntu on s340?

Yes @OstroL, I tested. Not installed yet for the following reasons.

Config - i5, 8GB RAM, 512 GB SSD, 1TB HDD. Win 10 pre-installed with Digital license.
Wifi card KIller AX1650, RST disk drivers in BIOS/UEFI…

Ubuntu 18.04 worked well using a USB stick. I intend to install it soon.
Ubuntu 20.04 did not recognize wifi card possibly because my wifi card is Killer™ Wi-Fi 6 AX1650. Saw few references that Kernel 5.4 bundled with 20.04 doesn’t work with this card as yet. It needs Kernel 5.1 to 5.3.
Tried Linux Mint 19.3 Tricia. It is bundled with Kernel 5.0 which also apparently doesn’t work well with Killer. Couldn’t recognize wifi nw.
Didn’'t want to upgrade or downgrade Kernels.
Anyway, I have been using Ubuntu 18.04 for some time and am happy that it works well.

Haven’t installed Ubuntu 18.04 yet for the following reasons-
I made large partitions on the SSD and HDD for Ubuntu with a view to retain Win 10 installation in a corner. But discovered that Ubuntu is not recognizing SSD during installation. Some research indicated that possibly it has something to do with the RST disk drivers loaded by the BIOS/UEFI. The BIOS/UEFI is configured for RST disk drivers and Win 10 was pre-installed.
This too seems to be documented. I found this link that summarized the likely issue well.

Lenovo BIOS/UEFI allows change of RST drivers to AHCI, but then the pre-installed Win 10 may not work as documented.

I won’t install Ubuntu without SSD. So just trying to work out some options.
Have seen some solutions, but changing the BIOS/UEFI drivers to AHCI and re-installing Win 10 seems to be least problematic to me.
My use is not very intensive or special so I could probably let go the RST advantages, whatever they may be.

Still thinking about this. Will report what happens.

Thanks for following up. Appreciate it.

@OstroL, just want to acknowledge that you had warned me about these issues in your earlier post. Thank you. That was amazing…

If the s340 has a 10th gen processor, it has an nvme drive, so when you look in the bios, you’d see it is RST. But, don’t change the RST to AHCI, before you do the part How to safely re-configure Windows to use AHCI from that instruction, that is, you have to make both iaStorV (Start and StartOverride) and storahci (Start and StartOverride) values to 0. This is shown with the images there.

Then, only then, you can re-enter Bios and change RST to AHCi. When you reboot, the laptop would boot to Windows 10. Then, you insert your usb stick with Ubuntu and boot into live system. You can do that by pressing F12 at start and then by choosing Linpus lite. Once the Linux distro booted in, you can check in the gparted app, whether the nvme drive is recognised. If you can see it in gparted, you can easily dual boot.

I haven’t tried Ubuntu 18.04, but 20.04 and other Linuxes, Opensuse, Fedora etc.

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Noted. Thanks.
Specific details I see are as follows-
Processor - i5-1035G4
BIOS - Lenovo CUCN16WW(V1.05) 15/10/19
SSD - INTEL SSDPEKNW512G8L
HDD - WDC WD10SPZX-00Z1OTO

You can also look here. https://answers.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/forum/windows_10-hardware/how-to-enable-ahci-for-ssd-in-windows-10/18ee0b43-47a9-4344-b0c8-1e8546be2c82

Thanks.

I am also wondering if it would be easiest to just reinstall Win 10 with a USB recovery stick by setting the BIOS/UEFI driver mode to AHCI. Its a new laptop, nothing installed other than Win 10. Not sure if that would achieve the desired goal.

You cannot simply replace RST with AHCI, but you can do that by using the way Windows 10 answer has shown. Windows 10 works quite well with AHCI drivers (as shown in there). Ubuntu or other Linux doesn’t see the nvme disk, so you need to move the disk to AHCI. By the way, as you have a new laptop, nothing is going to be lost. Windows 10 is baked into the mobo, anyway, so you can reinstall it any time, every time. The Windows 10 answer (the 1st one) shows you how to change RST to AHCI.

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Noted. Thanks. Will get some time next week. Will report.

Better yet, install VirtualBox in W10 and run Linux in a VM, especially on a new machine!!!

@OstroL: I edited the Win 10 registry entries and changed BIOS/UEFI RST driver setting to AHCI.
Windows booted normally and I haven’t seen anything wrong yet. So looks like it has worked…
Thanks for your guidance… Really appreciate.

After this change, one other issue seems to have arisen during booting with the Ubuntu 18.04 USB
that I had used earlier to test Ubuntu on this laptop. So haven’t been able to test if Ubuntu is now
recognizing the SSD or not.

The new problem is that after booting from Ubuntu USB the following message
is appearing before the laptop just shuts off.

“Failed to open \EFI\BOOT\mmx64.efi - Not Found” etc

This error and one solution is here : https://letsfoss.com/fix-efi-boot-mmx64-efi-not-found/

But I found many more references on the web and more complex solutions.
Haven’t tried any solution yet. I will do some reading and then attempt it.
Will report if Ubuntu is working with SSD and HDD after that.

Thanks again.

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